Editing Madeira wine (section)

=== Other labelling ===
[[File:Blandys Winery - Funchal, Madeira.jpg|thumb|Storage of vintage Madeira wine, Blandys Winery, [[Funchal]]]]
Wines made from at least 85% of the noble varieties of Sercial, Verdelho, Bual, and Malvasia are usually labelled based on the amount of time they were aged:<ref name="Sotheby pg 340-341"/>
* '''Colheita''' or '''Harvest''' – This style includes wines from a single vintage, but aged for a shorter period than true Vintage Madeira. The wine can be labelled with a vintage date but includes the word ''colheita'' on it. Colheita must be a minimum of five years of age before being bottled and may be bottled any time after that. Effectively, most wineries would drop the word Colheita once bottling a wine at over 19 years of age because it is entitled to be referred to as vintage once it is 20 years of age. At that point, the wine can command a higher price than if it were still to be bottled as Colheita. This differs from Colheita Port which is a minimum of seven years of age before bottling.
* Wines labeled '''Fine''' or '''Finest''', or without any indication of age, have been aged for at least three years and are the most common wines used in cooking.
* '''Reserve''' (five years) – This is the minimum amount of aging a wine labelled with one of the noble varieties are permitted to have.
* '''Special Reserve''' (10 years) – At this point, the wines are often aged naturally without any artificial heat source.
* '''Extra Reserve''' (over 15 years) – This style is rare to produce, with many producers extending the aging to 20 years for a vintage or producing a ''colheita''. It is richer in style than a Special Reserve Madeira.
* '''Vintage''' or '''Frasqueira''' – This style must be aged at least 19 years in a cask and one year in bottle, therefore cannot be sold until it is at least 20 years of age. The word ''vintage'' does not appear on bottles of vintage Madeira because, in Portugal, the word "Vintage" is a trademark belonging to the Port traders.


The terms pale, dark, full, and rich can also be included to describe the wine's colour.

Madeira produced from Negra Mole grapes used to be legally restricted to use generic terms on the label to indicate the level of [[sweetness (wine)|sweetness]] as ''seco'' (dry), ''meio seco'' (medium dry), ''meio doce'' (medium sweet) and ''doce'' (sweet). However, in 2015 the Madeira Wine Institute announced that producers may officially recognise Tinta Negra on their front labels and that all "expressions" must state their bottling date.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2015/05/madeira-clarifies-message/ |title=Article in 'The Drinks Business' |date=11 May 2015}}</ref>

Wines listed with ''Solera'' were made in a style similar to [[sherry]], with a fractional blending of wines from different vintages in a [[solera]] system.<ref name="Oxford pg 416-419"/> The Solera method of blending is most widely practiced in the sherry production of Spain. Initially, the rules for Madeira soleras were different, with a maximum of ten percent of the wine in the solera being permitted to be drawn off and replaced each year, and the process repeated a maximum of ten times before the solera had to be completely emptied; as such a significant proportion of wine in any bottle would be from the listed year. However, at some unknown time, laws were loosened to allow soleras to be used indefinitely as they are in Sherry production, resulting in some later and less expensive Solera wines containing microscopic quantities of the listed old vintage.<ref name="Madeira Wine Guide">{{cite web |title=Madeira Wine Guide |url=https://www.fortheloveofport.com/madeira-wine-guide/3/ |website=For the Love of Port |access-date=17 April 2025}}</ref> Another interesting peculiarity of old solera Madeiras is that they were initially developed as a result of trying to extend the stocks of vintages when the vines had stopped being productive due to Phylloxera. Therefore, as there was no younger wine to add to the vintage, it was usually older wines that were added. In recent years, vintage Madeiras have been commanding higher prices than soleras, but, from 1966 (when Michael Broadbent started wine auctions at Christie's), until about the end of the 20th century, solera Madeiras always fetched a premium at auction over the vintage ones.